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What is community-based monitoring, reporting and verification?
conditions needed to put CMRV into practice; and d use this information
for national MRV reporting. Through a series of presentations, activities and
exercises, organizers worked with the participants to gauge their views and
opinion and to have them interact and test different tools used for CMRV.
Participants came from more than a dozen different countries and repre-
sented governments, communities and technical experts. All shared knowledge
and learned about tools, methods and CMRV experiences in other countries.
Throughout the report you will read brief
‘workshop observations’ highlighting interesting topics, anecdotes or ques-
tions about working with CMRV that came up during the sessions.
The workshop was held in Guyana because it is the irst country in the world
with a functioning national-scale MRV system. The country also has an
important indigenous population that owns 13.9 per cent of the total forest in
Guyana. In this context, CMRV is key to making REDD+ work at the national level.
The lead workshop organizer was Naikoa Aguilar-Amuchastegui of the WWF Forest
and Climate Programme. Co-organizers included Jon Parsons, Lucy Goodman
and Helen Bellield of the Global Canopy Programme, along with Sylvia Wilson,
Coral Roig-Silva and the U.S. Geological Survey SilvaCarbon Program.
COMMUNITY-BASED MONITORING, REPORTING AND VERIFICATION CAN
HELP US HAVE A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF DEFORESTATION FOR:
1. Developing national MRV systems
n
Identifying, assessing and under- standing the drivers of deforestation
n
Providing historical background and context that is related to how drivers
operate and interact in the area e.g. regional conlicts, disputes, cultural
elements
n
Validating data produced by national MRV that is used to design national
and regional policies
n
Designing mitigation measures depending on local needs
n
Assessing leakage risks by helping to understand the displacements of
activities and the reasons behind these
n
Helping measuring carbon above- and below-ground biomass,
measuring land cover, verifying remote-sensing imagery and
providing information on safeguards
2. Monitoring and safeguards infor- mation systems
n
Providing a global-to-local approach as it helps to identify those conditions
that enable global drivers of deforesta- tion and forest degradation and
deining the reasons for occurrence in some places and not in others
n
Allowing for sound design of the monitoring system itself by identifying
the right indicators e.g. understanding the rationale for local decision-making
such as when to use shifting cultivation practices and understanding how
community members decide where to put the next crop
n
Identifying pressure areas that are likely to be converted in the future
n
Developing alternative land-use scenarios in those areas that are under
pressure to be deforested
3. Supporting local decision-making
n
Providing baseline information to make joint decisions between commu-
nity and government on land use
n
Promoting education and awareness of communities and policymakers
n
Generating good activity data of the local area, zoning and planning land
use, and developing future alternative scenarios
n
Incorporating a decision-making process in the analysis of the overall
data to enhance the accuracy of the data and to tailor mitigation actions
4. Securing broader transparency and effectiveness of forest policies
